We're setting data, code and APIs free.

#SpaceApps Global Judging Open Now

May 09, 2012 by Ali Llewellyn

Open Data

space apps

judging

software development

hackathon

Global voting starts today for the International Space Apps Challenge! The Space Apps Challenge fosters innovation by providing a platform for citizens from around the world to work together to solve current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need. The Innovation Endeavors and Talenthouse community of investors, entrepreneurs and advisors are here to support and celebrate these teams and their innovations to the fifty challenges – and invite you to vote for your favorite App. The final winners will be determined with your votes and along with an internationally recognized jury of investors and entrepreneurs from Innovation Endeavors.

The videos submitted on behalf of each nominated project also demonstrate the vision of the collaboration process, the passion of the participants, and what it means to them to engage the data in their context. These videos tell the story about what is possible when people get a vision about exploration and for changing the world with science. What earth observation data could help people, organizations, and governments make better decisions? How can we convey the orbital perspective to people on Earth? What are other low-cost off-the-shelf hardware options for exploration? What are new ways we could visualize data? How else could we communicate ideas too big for words or organize data bigger than we have yet been able to manage? What new things can we learn when we mashup data sources? How can we share data more efficiently? Space Apps asked all these questions in the global community – and discovered some interesting ideas and answers along the way.

Aurora Project: Model & Data (Dublin, Ireland) An app that visualizes near-real time aurora data. During the Science Hack Day Dublin in March, we built up an Aurora Lamp. This consisted on an artistic representation of an Aurora using LEDs. However, this was not connected with any data feed. For the Space Apps Challenge we tried to improve this original project by using real data. On one side we developed a program that automatically downloads and processes data from NOAA’s POES satellites. This gives an indication of aurora activity. However, as the satellites measure just what is below them the data needs to be extrapolated to show all the hemisphere. Simultaneously, we also developed software to generate a layer for Google Earth showing the forecast of aurora activity. This is based on magnetic field measurements from NASA’s ACE spacecraft. Vote here.

Code/Game Controller/Water Sampling Mechanism OpenROV Framework Development Challenge (San Francisco, USA) OpenROV is a DIY telerobotics community centered around underwater exploration and education. The community has developed a low-cost telerobotic submarine that can be built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and is increasingly capable of doing serious scientific research. The goal of the project is to democratize exploration by allowing anyone to explore and study underwater environments. The OpenROV community is also laying the foundation for globally-connected citizen scientists to share their data and findings. Vote here.

Commonality of NASA Datasets (Adelaide, Australia) A data schema attempts to capture the commonalities between datasets acquired by NASA to allow citizen scientists and data mining softwares to quickly locate relevant datasets required to answer questions posed in broad terms, such as “Has the sea level risen in the last 10 years? Have you ever had a question and not been sure where you could get the data to answer it? Team Adelaide’s Space Apps project is here to help!
We’ve produced an RDFS schema that attempts to capture the commonalities between datasets acquired by NASA, to allow citizen scientists and data mining software to quickly locate relevant datasets required to answer questions posed in broad terms. Vote here.

Daily Myths (San Francisco, USA) An app to help education the public on common misconceptions regarding the solar system and astronomy. There are many misconceptions about science. Our challenge was to create a trivia website to educate people of all ages about science by developing a simple game. Vote here.

Exoapi.com (New York City, USA) ExoAPI is an ongoing project that extends the accessibility of exoplanetary data by providing an easy to use RESTful API. ExoAPI was created during the NASA Space Apps Challenge [spaceappschallenge.org] by a team of three amazing geniuses who knew nothing about space before they started this…and still don’t really. Currently the data is provided by http://exoplanetology.blogspot.com/ who in turn feeds the data from http://exoplanet.eu/. The ExoAPI team plans on extending the API to encompass a wider array of data sources and more interesting space data to reach as many programmers as possible and encourage an explosion of space data based mashups. Vote here.

Fragile Oasis Mashup (Lausanne, Switzerland) A custom user interface to display the data from Fragile Oasis website in a world map. Fragile Oasis is an effort to get everyone to see the Earth as a single home for humanity, and to inspire people to make a difference, changing things for the better. Our mashup focuses on giving a great user experience on the Fragile Oasis dataset by means of geolocalization, category filtering, data enhancement from multiple sources, etc. Vote here.

Growers Nation (Exeter UK, San Francisco USA, New York City USA, Santiago Chile, Nairobi Kenya and Santo Domingo Dominican Republic) An app that explores the potential of unused land for the growing of fruit, vegetable and other crops through the use of location, climate and growing data. The Grower’s Nation application is designed to reduce the barriers to growing by taking location, climate and growing conditions data into consideration and aims to give more people the information they need when selecting what to grow. The crop dataset we are creating is possibly the first of its kind that is available open source, and will enable cross referencing of crop, climate, weather and soil data. When complete, it will include the growing conditions required for different varieties of fruit, vegetables and grains. During the challenge weekend, we had some great collaborations with teams from around the world including: Exeter, San Francisco, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Nairobi and New York. We hope to continue collaborating with related projects into the future. There is a lot of potential for follow on work from this project and the Growers Nation team members are enthusiastic to continue working on what they regard as a very worthwhile project. Vote here.

HXL Exporter (Jakarta, Indonesia) An app that exports an excel database to the HXL standard. HXL, Humanitarian Exchange Language, is machine-readable language. HXL product can be updated in near real-time.HXL is the answer for significant delay which is faced by humanitarian manager during crisis response.HXL Exporter as a component for HXL is very important because it use to gather and sent the important information during crisis response. Every Information in the format of spreadsheet or service (API) which are come from many different NGO can be easily sent out, translated and unite (in one format) to HXL data storage. Indonesia had faced many natural phenomena such as earthquake and tsunami. And NGO has helped us during the crisis. hopefully, the application that I build for helping in developing HXL is a gratitude from the Indonesian people to the world. Vote here.

ISSlive API And Limit Notification System (Bangalore, India) A native Android and iOS app that implements REST API for ISSLive data consisting of space station system parameters and crew timeline data. Designing and implementing REST API for ISSLive data consisting of space station system parameters and crew timeline data. Further developing an SDK and a demo webapp to help application developers use the REST API easily. Finally, Limit notification system will be developed to allow applications to get notified when a custom set of limits are reached. Native Andriod and iOS applications will also be developed. These will allow the user to browse the data using REST API and will use the above Limit notification system to notify users when a subscribed event occurs. Vote here.

Kepler Visualizer (Bangalore, India) A solution to visualize Kepler data, such as changing star intensity, using an Arduino. Kepler Visualizer aims to visualize the data gathered by Kepler mission in multiple presentation forms. It uses Arduino to visualize Kepler data and present it in an audio-visual form (LED lights, motor and complementing sound) to aid us to visualize the changing star intensity. The objective is to enable school children understand how kepler data is used to find extrasolar planets and visualize binary star systems, planetary transits, and variable stars. Vote here.

Linkastar (Tokyo, Japan) A web application for iOS that allows users to search for a star by holding iphone or ipad to the night sky if it’s cloudy. ‘LinkAStar’ is a social communication app that users can wish upon a star on AR and share with friends or someone else on the planet. Vote here.

My Travel App (Canberra and Melbourne, Australia) How would you like to save time, money, effort on your daily commute while ALSO helping the environment? The solution we propose for the My Travel Impact challenge does just that! By aggregating yours and others usage data, calculating carbon usage based on the distance and mode of transport you take, this app will provide you with a list optimised routes detailing time, cost and carbon usage to give you ultimate control on your journey! If even just a small percentage of smartphone users are influenced to change their commuting habits to more environmentally friendly modes of transport, the potential that the MyTravel App has in the battle to reduce carbon emissions is enormous. Vote here.

Planet Hopper (Oxford, United Kingdom) Aimed at school children and non-scientists, Planet Hopper isﾠa prototype web app that makes the Kepler exoplanet data more accessible by displayingﾠit in a visual and fun way, making comparisons with each planetﾠto our own. By presenting the data in this way, Planet Hopper aims toﾠraise interest in the new discoveries of hundreds ofﾠplanets orbiting otherﾠstars, stimulate questions and encourage debate about what it might be likeﾠthere, andﾠthe plausibility, or otherwise, of life on these planets. Through a simple interface, you choose a star using the systemﾠfinder then view its planets. Find out how longﾠit would take to get to there,ﾠhow old you would be if you were born there there, or how high you could jumpﾠifﾠyou were standing on the planet’s surface. Perhaps its sun is a strangeﾠcolour, or much larger in the sky thanﾠEarth’s. Go to www.planethopper.co.ukﾠand explore. Vote here.

Space Ring Design App (Tokyo, Japan) Jewelry created using the location of a planet in space on a desired date and time. “astro-ornaments” (formerly “Space Ring Design App”) is the solution by the Artistic Data Materialization Team, Tokyo, JAPAN. Vote here.

Strange Desk (Oxford, United Kingdom) An app that allows users to socially share and analyze the occurrence of strange events with others. Strange Desk is a vision of using living data and a crowd of impassioned citizen scientists to help support the space program from the ground. From the migration of species or weird weather, to black swans and bumblebees. Strange Desk could become a powerful asset in understanding our rapidly changing planet. Vote here.

Travelisa (Jakarta, Indonesia) Travelisa is an application to keep track of an individual’s travel history, distance, and methods and determine the impact it has on the individual as well as in wider community. The results of the collected data is expected to influence the individual’s travel behavior by discovering the most efficient means to travel. The app can also determine the carbon emission of individuals based on their methods of travel. Vote here.

Ufahamu (Nairobi, Kenya) Ufahamu is a data visualization platform that promotes awareness on health related issues. Ufahamu is a ‘swahili’ word for Awareness. This project is based on Data Visualization, Fragile Oasis: Map-a-Difference category. Ufahamu is a tool that performs visualization of data related to health issues from opendata repositories like opendata.go.ke; which it combines with existing geo datasets from NASA opendata and other reliable sources. Additionally, Ufahamu can also perform a mash up of different datasets establishing relationship as to how they relate. Such provides information that can be easily understood and interpreted by researchers, public and private NGO’s, interested parties, and common persons. This is meant to arm the public with information on underprivileged areas, as a result driving efforts towards improving the health situation around communities. Vote here.

Watch Out – Hazard Map (Melbourne, Australia) We are proposing to use people as sensors and social networks as the infrastructure for the early warning systems. Using this method, in less than a minute; citizens and governments of any country can be aware of disasters in any part of the world. We have developed a web based map that tells you, in real time, locations of natural disasters. The hazard data is sourced from social networks. Our application detects hazards from dialogues in social networks such as Twitter. Vote here.

Vicar2png(Virtual Participation) Much of the image data from NASA’s Planetary Image Atlas is in the VICAR format, which was unreadable by any existing open source image conversion tools. We wrote and packaged vicar2png so that anyone can view, enjoy, and remix NASA’s mission image data easily by converting VICAR files to the popular PNG image format. Our submission video demos vicar2png and showcases some beautiful images we converted from NASA’s Cassini mission, as well as a short movie stitched together from raw Cassini data. Vote here.

Connect and Survive! (Exeter, United Kingdom) We want people to learn to manage long-term healthcare through connecting to healthcare information in their homes. If we only ever use computers to connect people to data then we are neglecting the majority of the global population. At the SpaceApps Challenge in Exeter we made a demonstrator Pollen Predictor that used live pollen data to change the colour of a 3D printed pollen ball. The colour of the ball is used to represent the next day’s pollen level. So what next? We would love to develop this into a standalone Physical App that enables people to see data. In the first place we would like to design products to help children manage asthma caused by pollen allergies and to test this across a range of cultures and languages. Vote here.

Growing Fruits: Pineapple Project (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) Our success was the result of a dedicated team that is passionate about exploring the potential of unused land for growing fruit, vegetables and other crops. Multiple resources (currently in the Beta testing phase) have been designed to reduce the barriers to growing by taking location, climate, and growing requirements into consideration to provide potential farmers recommendations they need when deciding what to plant. Vote here.

My Travel Impact (Melbourne, Australia) The system was developed to demonstrate how transport and weather data can be represented in an easy to read format with the aim of changing travel behaviour. Currently the app allows a user to record travel information, calculate and compare their carbon impact against the wider community and considers how the weather alters a user’s travel impact. This project has the potential to impact the global community through awareness. It has the ability to provide suggestions on travel based on weather and past experience. The aim of this project is to create a community movement by giving people enough information to make greener travel decisions. Vote here.

Offline-Online Solution(Virtual Participation) This is the demo pitch of the Mobile Web App in HTML5 solution to the “Offline-online problem.” There is also a demo of the application available (see comments in Challenge page). The team, in virtual participation, have been working from 4 different time-zones; this video has been made after the challenge by the “Italians” of the team. Vote here.

Night Time Illumination (Sydney, Australia) Analysis of night time illumination can be used as a measure of development, especially in rural areas. We built a tool which compares different geospatial data sources, allowing differential measurements to be made over time. In this case it was used to compare night time illumination with population density changes over the last 20 years. Vote here.

CERES (New York, New York) Farmers in the developing world lack proper access to food pricing information. Without proper information, rural farmers are vulnerable to a variety of problems.CERES solves these problems by allowing farmers to exchange commodity price information with their peers, allowing them to make better-informed decisions. Farmers interact with the service by using SMS to check current prices within seconds. For large purchasers and governments, CERES provides a powerful web interface for decision makers to view the data in aggregate. Over the coming months, our launch partner, Opportunity International – Nicaragua, will be piloting our application in rural Nicaragua. Won’t you join us in driving economic transformation? Vote here.

Please vote for your favorite apps… and share your thoughts here about other ways that citizens can engage NASA’s open data to communicate new ideas, create new technologies, and make the world a better place.